Rest of the Day: Microsoft Pulls Out of the Smartphone Race
Microsoft is downsizing its smartphone business, agreeing that you probably won’t buy a Microsoft phone anytime soon, if ever. Lumiya, we hardly knew you. About this and much more in today’s latest news.
- Microsoft is essentially destroying the remnants of its consumer smartphone division. After selling their phone division last week, they are now cutting 1,850 jobs as part of an “optimization” process. “We will continue to innovate across devices and in our cloud services across all mobile platforms,” says CEO Satya Nadella. [Gizmodo via Recode ]
- Hope you enjoy the ads because Google Maps is more brand-friendly. Before long, you’ll see small branded badges on some businesses like Walgreens when browsing the map and in search results, as well as potential coupons if you click on the logo. [Inside AdWords via The Verge ]
- Microsoft’s experimental news aggregator for iOS, News Pro, has its own bot. It’s called Rowe, and you can chat with the bot in the app to get the latest headlines. It’s not very helpful – asking Roe about election news isn’t much different from a simple Google search – but Roe’s answers are said to be “personalized.” It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. [TechCrunch]
- Parallels Access for iOS, which allows remote access to Mac and Windows virtual machines, recently received a good update for iPad Pro users. It now runs at the full native resolution of the iPad Pro and supports Apple Pencil. [9to5Mac]
- Periscope can now save your default stream just like Facebook Live. Twitter previously experimented with archiving videos on the service with the hashtag “#save”. Although I like the idea of ephemerality.